


as honest as you let me

by inlovewithnight



Category: Focus (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 02:37:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3552890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five jobs Jess did on her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as honest as you let me

1\. Jess isn’t any kind of a sports fan. But among grifters and lifters it’s well-known that when a team wins a big thing, all of the players get big, fancy, expensive rings to commemorate the occasion. Rings are, of course, highly portable and easy to remove either by creating an excuse or employing the right kind of distraction.

As Nicky went on and on about, like he was making some kind of point she had any interest in, Jess wasn’t any kind of a grifter. She couldn’t play the seductress, she didn’t do very well at damsel in distress. She could do goofy and naïve, or goofy and playful, or goofy and horny. She had an absolute lock on those. It wasn’t enough range for grifting. 

It was just _fine_ for lifting, though, and even if Nicky look down on it for some reason, she was _good_ at it.

She was good at doing her research, too. Players didn’t wear those rings all the time, just to the round of parties that happened after they won. Professional football players were expensive resources who went highly guarded. Ditto for basketball. Soccer was too far in the opposite direction; not enough value on what they got to make it worth the hawking.

Hockey came up right in her comfort zone. Too small-time for them all to have bodyguards, big-time enough that the trophy had a special name. _Stanley Cup_. Kinda nerdy. Really charming.

She spent three weeks drifting from party to party in a post-industrial Midwestern town, smiling at large men with busted-up faces and false teeth that didn’t always line up quite right. They were all _really_ friendly, and sweet. Many were Canadian.

She felt kind of bad about when she finally lifted the championship ring off two of them, brothers or cousins or maybe just best friends with a really intense bond, from Manitoba. They really, earnestly wanted to tell her about the town they grew up in, and offer to take her fishing on a lake someday. It was almost tempting, the way they told it, except it sounded cold.

The league would replace their rings, and the lift would get her enough for a trip to Ibiza. Win-win.

2\. In Las Vegas, she spent an entire night at one of the truly stupidest clubs she had ever been in. The theme was bad, the lighting was bad, the drinks were overpriced and watered-down and bad, and the crowd was pathetic. 

But she was there on the heels of a young man with the number three single on the charts, a vague endorsement from the godfather of his subgenre, and a weakness for redheads that she and a box of Clairol were 100% ready to exploit. She was going to get the watch of his wrist or the wallet out of his pocket. Failing that, the phone out of the hand it seemed to be surgically attached to, because that probably had data on it that she could parcel out to TMZ piece by piece for a year.

Nicky would be _very_ disappointed in her for that. But Nicky hadn’t watched this guy grope a fourteen-year-old after his performance last night. Jess was more than happy to make his life crappy.

He was supposed to be doing a guest DJ set, but he never went anywhere near that end of the floor; he just sat in VIP and drank his way through expensive bottles while Jess lounged in the seat next to him and waited her turn. He drank, and he drank, and he drank. The music got louder and thumpier and less coherent. She got more bored.

Finally, he stood up and staggered off to the bathroom with his security guys, leaving his jacket draped over his chair. She looked at it for a long moment. His wallet was in his pocket, his phone was in his hand, his watch was on his wrist. The jacket might not even cover what she spent on wardrobe, hair, and makeup to get in here.

Unless she went ahead and put that shit on eBay.

The music thumpa-thumpa’d on. She made up her mind.

She put in the listing that it had his very own actual spilled drink discoloring the front. The final bid tripled her asking price.

3\. She ends up in DC after she makes the mistake of taking on another partner. Con men are jerks who always leave their partners holding the bag. She has _got_ to remember that.

As far as places to regroup went, DC wasn’t all that bad. She set up camp in bars near FBI headquarters, arriving at lunch, leaving for a mid-afternoon nap, and then setting up again for happy hour. The g-men were easy to spot and easy to flirt with. They liked women who would listen wide-eyed and not talk too much. Which was good, because if she started talking she would say something smart-ass and awkward, because wow, _boring_ , these guys. Boring and full of themselves.

Boring, full of themselves, and surprisingly careless about their phones and awareness of personal space. She lifted phones all day long. By the end of the evening shift, her purse was bulging with them.

An ex-FBI data analyst she met in a Starbucks her first day in town had told her that the FBI treated the phones like a normal office treated paper clips. They were assumed to walk away at any minute, so the policy was to immediately kill the missing phone without attempting recovery, hand the agent a new one with a mild talking-to, and move on.

The ones in her purse were dead and ready for resale with a new SIM card by the time she got back to her hotel room. Maybe the easiest turnover process she ever had. Once a day she raised a glass to the indifferent bulk-purchasing power of the US government. Long might it reign.

4\. She stayed in DC a little too long, long enough to get thoughtless. Posing as a Russian heiress to get into a party at the Liechtenstein embassy seemed foolproof. It never occurred to her for a minute that the Russian ambassador would _be_ there.

She spent a solid hour staying one step ahead of attempts to make a proper introduction, wielding appetizers, champagne, and dropped napkins as roadblocks. Waiters were useful for slaloming her way through the crowd. At one point she wove her wrap around the base of one of the embassy’s lovely decorative trees and set the gauzy fabric on fire. The ensuing chaos let her make a break for the bathroom.

She didn’t get the haul of jewelry she’d planned on, but a pair of cufflinks and a watch were tucked safely inside her bra when she crawled out the bathroom window and parkoured down to the lawn, and that would have to be good enough.

She needed to go somewhere else. Clear her head. Somewhere with much less pressure.

5\. Texas was _much_ less pressure. And the watches were just as big.

More interestingly, though, who knew that expensive horses were bred with five-milliliter straws of frozen semen? Skinny little plastic things, and people who bred horses for fun would pay a hundred thousand dollars for them, if they were from the right horse.

She smiled her way into the barn, whispered an apology to the horse for all of the expensive babies he’d never get to meet, and sent the owner off to get her a Diet Coke as soon as he showed her where the freezer was.

They were all neatly labeled. She took five of each for the three stallions kept in stalls that were nicer than most of the apartments she had lived in. If they weren’t hundred-thousand-dollar breeders, they must be close. Over a million dollars in her purse.

She probably didn’t get to the Quick Stop to buy a cooler and ice in time for the things to still be viable, but there was no reason for the guy she would sell them to to know that. Someone that careless with their money shouldn’t get to keep baby horses anyway. 

She took his watch, too. Because she liked it.


End file.
